Google isn’t necessarily the seller, but Best Buy, Staples, Amazon, Walmart and Target could hash out a deal with Google (or Bing, etc.) for “insights”.

This post is posed as the next big step in internet pricing, not something necessarily happening today.

Today, it’s not standard procedure outside of some specific segments (that I know of, maybe airfare? But the data fed in is more limited) but tapping into the vast amounts of data we leak through the services we use is far too big of a gold mine for companies to overlook researching and tapping into. There’s a lot of things that need to happen (who supplies data? Google is the hypothetical here but what’s their price? etc.) but it’s absolutely feasible at scale.

excellent, glad to hear

Does RCS work reliably on Graphene? I thought Google was fucking with RCS quietly for those on custom ROMs or other things.

Not Just Bikes just put up a video about how fire-fighters and their trucks fight for wider roads while having larger trucks than the rest of the world. Perfect timing there.

When you say “couch” my first thought is a recent-ish Celeron or Pentium Silver fanless laptop. Performance akin to a Core 2 Duo but no fan to get blocked sitting on the couch. Like the Latitude 3210(?)

Laptops that appeal to me are often bottom breathers so it’s one thing I miss from my old MB Air.

You’d have to check, my personal X1 Extreme Gen 4 has the toggle but my new work T14 Gen 3 does not.

Not weird at all, I loved it’s left-turn into generational trauma, nihilism and absurdism (not unlike how I enjoyed Barbie’s unhinged nature) but would definitely say a lot of it would resonate more with Millennial/Gen Z children-of-immigrants like Bao, the short.

I’m sure you tried but the definitive option would be a BIOS switch to change it. Sometimes is says S3, sometimes it says Linux sleep (like my personal ThinkPad)

But if you don’t have that toggle at all, the firmware probably dumped S3 entirely - especially if it’s a relatively new machine and you’ll have to lean much more on Hibernate like my new work ThinkPad.

I would investigate whether an older BIOS version still has the S3 toggle since some BIOS updates have removed S3 I believe but a search of forums would probably turn up enough complaints to hit your radar.

Results may vary but you can always plug it back in after testing.

Toyota’s have no negative effects beyond obviously no cellular functions and the microphone ceasing to work.

I recommend figuring out what the opt-out procedure is too. If I ended up with a Toyota, calling in via the SOS button will start the process of disconnecting the system.

Also note that some may have 3G radios, etc. which are already defunct.

Edit: Fixed typo

Bingo, I saw an ROG Ally(?) on display at Best Buy the other day and it was sitting on the Windows 11 desktop with a couple applications open like any demo laptop out on the floor - what dumbstruck me is that the scaling was set so the interface was absolutely tiny. Of course someone could have messed with DPI settings but it just looked like an interface for ants!

Windows 8 or 10’s tablet mode would have probably gone a ways towards making it more suited for a handheld but that function is gone.

At least the bottom edge swipe opens the start menu which I found by mistake. Maybe Big Picture mode would help.

That’s incredible, happy to see the old hardware still kicking!

On a similar note, sometime a year ago I spotted a guy using a Q10 at a shopping center in LA. Had a quick chat which was fun.

Windows’s achilles heel is arguably its chief benefit - legacy compatibility and being the de facto platform for applications.

Back when I had a Surface RT, I thought it was awfully neat, ARM-compiled versions of Office, IE, Windows 8.x bits ran well and it was fanless with fine battery life. (although I surely sound weird, I had a Windows Phone back then too and the syncing with IE on both was a nice feature) It’s just they were pushing the Store then and if you jailbroke it, ARM applications were rare.

Apple is a pro at architecture transitions and can steer the whole ship, MS can put Windows on ARM all they want but OEM’s will be reluctant since it’ll be a relatively big risk to sell a “Windows, buuut…” computer and the popular closed-source applications probably won’t bother with ARM for a while

Man, I remember buying a Linux Format(?) magazine once and breaking out the included 7.10 CD.

Later distros I messed with I remember waiting hours for those few hundred MB to download on my parent’s DSL connection, oh how times have changed!

[torment nexus intensifies]